Sherry Chrisp

Given her mammoth task of coordinating the ICT PD Clusters programme facilitation team it’s lucky Sherry, by her own admission, is a  “creative type, tempered with a bit of realism, and a splash of order”. Mind you from all accounts, Sherry enjoys her job so much she hardly considers it working. As she says, “the role I have is so varied, I get to work with lots of wonderful people, organise some wonderful events, see people grow in their roles, and create exciting opportunities ... who wouldn’t love it?”

Sherry has teaching in her blood, as they say. Growing up in a teaching family she lived in various locales around New Zealand and also experienced life in Western Samoa. With the standard occupational choice for women at the time being teaching or nursing, Sherry opted for the former partly influenced by her distaste for wearing uniforms of any description.  

With her passion for “AV” and art, Sherry took on those roles at all of the schools she worked in. As the 80s metamorphed into the 90s and AV became AV and computers, Sherry was in a strong position to lead the transformation of education in New Zealand to reflect the dawning of the knowledge economy. Sherry put her own experiences into practice to assist this change as a professional development facilitator at Waikato University during the first years of the ICT PD Contracts in 1994-96.

After managing the chaos that erupts when entertaining her and her partner Jackie’s five children and six grandchildren, Sherry loves to walk her dog, play her favourite music loudly, and go swimming.